No subsequent read will match the hyperactive high of inhaling Catch-22 as a teenager, but on this third time round I was surprised how well it held up. I dug more then ever Heller's glitched, fragmentary plotting, the way incidents sprout from each other unpredictably, the timeline all cracked and distorted. The late Eternal City chapter hit just as hard as before with its Danteesque catalogue of manmade horrors, as did the succession of deaths and "disappearances" that wrench the novel from comic mode to tragic. And at their best, Heller's absurdist ack-ack dialogues still crack me up, though I've less patience now when they don't ignite, which is pretty often.

I still love the satire of capitalism in the form of the monstrous Milo — even 17 year-old me picked up on that — but this time a couple of other characters caught my attention. One was Aarfy, the most grotesque and disturbing person in the story, "like something inhuman", his pudginess and myopia marking him as impervious to reason, some kind of embodiment of the banality of evil as we see in a shocking incident late on. And the other was Orr, who comes to symbolize hope. Orr with his blue oar, his name also like "or", indicating an elusive but real alternative; implying that the parade of paradoxes, the book's endlessly escalating paranoia, might, in fact, have an out.

I think what makes Catch-22 a classic is just how hard it wants, like its hero (Orr, but Yossarian too), to live. It reminds me of Rabelais in its lust for life. Many of my favourite stories have this quality — I think it's why I like the picaresque — and it's why I can forgive Catch-22 its excess chapters and egregious zaniness. Even the reduction of every female character to tits and ass. "He thirsted for life and reached out ravenously to grasp and hold Nurse Duckett's flesh" — and in the next sentence, Kid Sampson is chopped in half.